Sublime

Asked about the highest level a person can achieve in this lifetime, Rabbi Abraham Isaiah Karelitz (Hazon Ish, 1878–1953) is purported to have responded: “To live seventy years without hurting another person.”

Despite this the Talmud understands the Torah to be commanding us to remonstrate even with our teacher or leader, should we see him doing something wrong.

even for the leaders of this form of Judaism, life is not linear, and serious progress is often the result of messy journeys.

Mediated by the models of their culture, the Torah’s prohibitions become inscrutable decrees. Human dignity and human partnership are far more central in the rabbinic tradition.

Tzedakah lies close to the core of what it is to be a Jew. So much so that the rabbis said, ‘If someone is cruel and lacks compassion, there are sufficient grounds to suspect his lineage.’ Not to give is prima facie evidence that one is not a Jew.

“In this day and age,” said Rabbi Moshe, “the greatest devotion, greater than learning and praying, consists in accepting the world exactly as it happens to be.”

orthodoxes,

ethics is about responding not to human beings in general but to human beings in particular—and in all their particularity.

There is a rule in Jewish law that someone can impose a benefit on another person without his knowledge. Because he gains, we can therefore assume his agreement. But by the same token someone cannot impose an obligation on another person without his knowledge, for there is no reason to assume that he would agree.5 For that reason, children do not i